President Wooten in the News

News Coverage of President Lynn Wooten

• Meet MassLive’s 2025 Black leaders of Massachusetts (MassLive)
• The Next Crisis In Inevitable. The Urgent Call For The Prepared Leader (Forbes)
• Here’s what an aging workforce means for America’s employers (Forbes)
• 4 common ways leaders fail to learn from a crisis (Fast Company)
• Why Business Leaders Should Always Be Thinking About the Next Crisis (Time Magazine)
• Arlington's Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Observance (Arlington Community Media Inc.)
• 2022 MLK Day Speech Preview Interview (ACMi News)
• 2021 Women Who Mean Business (Boston Business Journal)
• Lynn Perry Wooten: 'It is so important that women leaders lift as they climb' (Boston Business Journal)
• Viewpoint: Why work isn’t working for women (Boston Business Journal)
• Eleven executives on how they build and support successful teams — even amid crisis (Boston Globe)
• The 2021 Top 100 Women-Led Businesses in Massachusetts (Boston Globe)
• Better Understanding: A Conversation with Lynn Perry Wooten (Better Understanding podcast)
• The Boston Globe Summit: The Future of Work: Reversing the She-cession (Boston Globe)
• Commencement Season Commences (WBUR)
• The COVID-19 ‘she-cession,’ imposter syndrome, and rebuilding the US economy (Boston Globe)
• ‘A monumental milestone’: Boston’s Black leaders react to Kim Janey’s historic rise to mayor (WHDH)
• The Future is Female (Boston Globe)
• Black, Educated, Educating and Changing Education (Gallup)
• On BBJ panel, women leaders discuss navigating 2020 (Boston Business Journal)
• Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Women's Network (Women's Network)
• Simmons President On Combating Racial Injustice On Campus: "This Has To Be Collective Work" (WGBH)
• The CRISIS Leader (Diversity Woman)
• CityLine: Sunday, September 6, 2020: Dr. Lynn Perry Wooten (WCVB5)
• WBUR Town Hall RECAP: The Post-Pandemic Society (WBUR)
• Priority No. 1: Keeping Students on Track to Graduate (Inside Higher Ed)
• Colleges need to think beyond this fall (Commonwealth Magazine)
• Cornell dean to become Simmons’ first Black president (Boston Globe)
• Simmons University names first African American president (Boston Business Journal)
• Dr. Lynn Perry Wooten Named First Black President of Simmons University (Diverse Issues in Higher Education)
• Lynn Perry Wooten Will Be The First Black President Of Simmons University (WBUR)
• Incoming Simmons president Lynn Perry Wooten looks to redefine college (Boston Business Journal)

Press Toolkit

About President Wooten

Lynn Perry Wooten, a seasoned academic and an expert on organizational development and transformation, became the ninth president and first African American to lead Simmons University on July 1, 2020.

Specializing in crisis leadership, diversity and inclusion, and positive leadership — organizational behavior that reveals and nurtures the highest level of human potential — Dr. Wooten is an innovative leader whose research has informed her work in the classroom and as an administrator.

She first joined a university faculty in 1994 and has served in administrative roles since 2008. Dr. Wooten came to Simmons from Cornell University, where she was the David J. Nolan Dean and Professor of Management and Organizations at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. She also has had a robust clinical practice, providing leadership development, education, and training for a wide variety of institutions.

Dr. Wooten is the author of two books, Positive Organizing in a Global Society: Understanding and Engaging Differences for Capacity Building and Inclusion (2016) and Leading Under Pressure: From Surviving to Thriving Before, During, and After a Crisis (2010), nearly 30 journal articles, and more than 15 book chapters.

A graduate of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where she earned a BS in accounting, Dr. Wooten also holds an MBA from the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, a PhD in business administration from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, and a Certificate in Advanced Educational Leadership from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Dr. Wooten began her career as assistant professor at the University of Florida Warrington College of Business. In 1998 she returned to the University of Michigan, where she was on the faculty of the Ross School of Business for nearly 20 years and served as Co-Faculty Director of the Center for Positive Organizations, Co-Faculty Director of the Executive Leadership Institute, and Senior Associate Dean for Student and Academic Excellence. She left Michigan in 2017 for the deanship at Cornell.

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